Wordle mode:

The story of Wordle is best described keeping its one rule in mind: Five-letter words only.

“Tracy would dream weird words every night.
Folks using phone, guess games, daily.
Users tweet posts, share score, later."

One new word, in the universe of all possible five-lettered meaningful english words, is the world’s best-kept secret every 24 hours. Tracy Benett handpicks it. The number of letters in her first name qualify to make her New York Times’ Wordle editor. If your twitter feed is anything like mine, then by noon, yellow, black and green squares start dropping all over like blocks of Tetris. Tracy’s choice makes or breaks the day for many. Some are posting humble brags about their winning streak, others go to bed sore losers, hoping tomorrow is another day.

It was The Bee Gees who first warned us about the power of words: “It’s only words. And words are all I have. To take your heart away”. Half a century later, the song seems to have inspired Josh Wardle, a man so 🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩, madly, deeply in love that he developed the game as a gift for his girlfriend!

Wordle became a global sensation in no time. In November 2021, just 90 people were playing it. Within two months, the game’s user base soared to 300,000 players worldwide. The addition of a share button in December 2021 gave us our daily flex. We could now broadcast our scores over whatsapp and facebook, in hope that our high-school english teacher would notice.

Coinciding with the third wave, Wordle and its variants surfaced all over the internet. Wordle’s mutations included parodies and clones like Lewdle, Heardle, Sweardle, Dordle, Octordle, Letterle, Absurdle. The game gave way to regional adaptations such as Urdle (Urdu), Ordlig (Swedish), Tamil wordle, and the likes, before becoming the most-googled term in 2022. Twitter bots started aggregating Wordle tweets and scores.

One such Twitter bot is @WordleStats. For each day, the bot shows us how many Twitter users posted their Wordle scores. It also presents a distribution of the number of attempts in which players could solve the day’s puzzle. Those publicly confessing their defeat are clubbed under X/6. The bot has been collecting this information since January 7, 2022. Over a one year period, it has the Wordle scores for 33 million tweets from users who chose to share their joy and sorrow, online. The bot will shut shop in February this year because of the recent change in Twitter’s policy which now restricts free access to Twitter’s API.


IF twitter posts are taken as a proxy for the actual number of people playing the game every day, then Wordle’s presence in our lives has long waned. The game is no longer a part of our morning routines and we are no longer worried every 24 hours about cracking a new five-letter word in six attempts. Interest in the game peaked on February 2, 2022, two days after NYT acquired the game. Over 2.5 million users posted their success and failure on a single day. “MOIST” was the Wordle word-of-the-day.


IF the words of Wordle were to be ordered based on difficulty, then a weighted average of guess rates calculated using @WordleStats’ data gives a ranking scale. A word is considered easy to guess (and is assigned the weight of one), if it is guessed in the first attempt by a majority of players. If it takes six attempts, then the word is hard, and assigned the weight of six. An X/6 word is super difficult, and typically would require 7 or 8 attempts. The weight assigned to this category is 7.5.


At 3.13 average score, ‘TRAIN’ was Wordle’s easiest-to-guess word. About 60% of players could guess it in their second or third attempt. And for 6% of those truly blessed by a good-luck fairy, it was even the opener word! ‘MUMMY’ gave players the hardest time. Only one in 5 players could guess it by the fourth attempt, and it took 5.56 attempts on average to guess. Rage-tweeting may be an everyday thing on Twitter, but on September 16, an unsuspecting five-letter word joined the club of all that has caused immense global hurt. This was the rarer word – ‘PARER’. 48% of players could not guess it within the permitted six attempts, and lost the game.

True to its meaning, PARER put the knife into the winning streaks of so many, that it was decided:


We could be angry at words for giving us a hard time. But the true difficulty of Wordle lies in its letter arrangement. The human mind is always optimising at the level of each blank. Each alphabet has a 1/26 chance of being picked at any given position and there are only two types of letters one can throw into the mix: consonants [C] and vowels [V]. Only so many permutations are possible for them to come together to fill 5 blanks, not all of which are meaningful english words. A five-letter word using all 5 vowels does not exist. But five consonants can come together and form a ‘TRYST’.

Vowels bring a rhythm to any word (even though the word rhythm has no vowel). The most common pattern in most games turns out to be CVCVC, on which words like BAKER, LEMON, or SUGAR are modeled. The problem begins when the mix of vowels and consonants is skewed. Words where vowels are together, preferably in the middle (TRAIN, CLEAN, HOARD) are easier to guess. Words with consecutive consonants seem harder, and on average take 4.41 guesses. But the real enemy of the masses is repeat letters. It’s not intuitive to the human mind, that is trying to blanket as many letters of the 26 alphabets in one go, to repeat one. GULLY, FUZZY, COYLY, with one set of duplicate letters, are harder to guess than words with all 5 unique letters. MUMMY, MOTTO, VIVID and CACAO, broke a lot of streaks, and hearts, with two(!!) sets of repeating letters. Wordle, clearly, is no place to enjoy guessing palindromes like MADAM or KAYAK either!


The lack of consensus on the best first starting word for the game proves that there are no rules. Less than 1% of words so far have started and ended both with a vowel. But ‘ADIEU’ and ‘AUDIO’ continue to be darling opening batsmen, for many trying to score (arrive at) the perfect six!

IF the frequency with which letters appear on each individual position is optimised to determine an opener, the first meaningful word then, would be “SOARE” (meaning a young hawk). In the first position, the most frequent letter so far is S. Vowels dominate the second and third position. Words seldom end in an S, honouring the no-plurals rule of Wordle. But once in a while, GEESE and FUNGI appear. Just Tracy’s way of showing us who is boss.


IF Wordle’s answers were laid out on a regular scrabble board, what would be some high-scoring words? Without any double or triple letter base board benefits, the most a word could fetch is 18 points! Wordle#487 i.e. the word QUIRK, sums up to be 10 + 1 + 1 + 5 = 18.


The dictionary of acceptable Wordle answers is 2,315 words long. And there are 12,947 valid five-letter words in the english language that make the universe of “allowed” guess words. It is near impossible to guess the word in the first go (1/2315, or 0.043%).

Yet, every data geek, statistician and mathematician has looked at the game as if it were an optimisation problem. I often sit down to solve Wordle with the nervousness of attempting an english examination. Between two-parts math-logic and one-part knowledge of the phonological rules of the english language, the only thing that gets me a win, is all parts luck!

Ashwin Poudel from Vellore Institute of Technology helped create the Wordle button.